Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I am Ian McCollum, and today we're going to take a look
at another version of the Spanish CETME L rifle.
This is the CETME LC, or Corto - short.
And what they effectively did, what CETME did to this rifle
is they chopped down the barrel. So the standard CETME L had a 400mm barrel, or
15.75 inch, the Corto model has a 12.6 inch barrel, or 320mm.
Then they got rid of the fixed solid plastic buttstock, and replaced that with a collapsing metal stock.
Which changes the balance slightly, there we go.
However, ... well, cutting down the barrel is a simple matter of cutting down the barrel.
Replacing the stock actually required changing up a bunch of the internal components,
because in the standard CETME L you have a recoil spring that sits here inside the buttstock.
So if you're going to do this to it, you have to redesign the parts, and put the recoil spring somewhere else.
So let me go ahead and pull the bits out of the inside of this, and let me show you how they did that.
So I have taken the internals out of a standard CETME L rifle,
and that is how the recoil spring would be configured.
So of course that's not going to work.
So let's go ahead and pop these two pins out.
Alright, we can pull that off, it's just a flat bit in there.
That tube has the spring for latching the folding stock.
Now if we pull out the recoil spring, you'll see it is slightly different from the standard one.
And this one I have been out shooting, so it is kind of disgustingly filthy
because roller delayed guns will do that.
Now, if we look at the bolt assemblies from both of these rifles,
you will see that this is the standard CETME L which has a sort of a buffer on the back,
or a spacer on the back that's hollow,
because the hammer has to swing up into here to hit the firing pin to actually fire it.
And because the recoil spring is directly in line behind the bolt there,
you need to hold it off, stand it off, so that it doesn't interfere with the hammer.
On the LC pattern up here, there is no spacer at the back because this
is going to go all the way to the back of the receiver,
which doesn't have extra space in it for the bolt to go into, like the standard fixed stock does.
Instead they have added the extra mass of this into the front.
Because this is a delayed blowback gun, the mechanics of it cycling properly
and how long it stays locked, and how quickly the bolt starts moving when it opens,
that's in large part dependent on the mass of the whole moving assembly.
And so you don't want to change the actual amount of weight,
so what they lost back here, they added up here.
If you look at the charging handle of this, which is a standard CETME L,
you can see that it's got this extension that goes way back here so that the handle sits far forward,
but it can still impinge on this chunk of the bolt carrier.
So the bolt carrier is going to be in battery right about there,
and the charging handle pushes on this, so that when you push this back,
it pushes the bolt assembly.
On the LC pattern down here, you can see that that extension on the charging handle is shorter,
and ... well, it's shorter to make up for the extra length here on the bolt carrier.
Now I think it's worth pointing out here that nothing else changed,
the CETME LC receiver is exactly the same as the standard CETME L receiver.
The inside of the charging handle is different, but the charging handle tube is not.
The handguard is the same, the front sight block is the same, the barrel has been shortened, but that's it.
So ... there are some parts of the gun that had to be changed to make it shorter,
but what didn't have to be changed was left, in an efficient manner, standard.
Now to go back to our internal parts.
Obviously there's no space in the LC to put this spring in the back of the gun,
so what they did instead is they hollowed out the top of this charging handle extension up there.
They nested the recoil spring into it, so it goes right about that far in.
They have to leave some of this solid to have the appropriate amount of mass,
but they have now moved the charging handle vertically up,
that allows them to get several inches of space forward.
They've actually made it shorter than the original recoil spring by about an inch and a half.
And if we overlay this on the receiver, this would actually be right about there when it's in battery.
And the recoil spring comes just to the back of the receiver, where it can be retained by this
sitting right there.
So everything just barely fits, and they do it by moving the recoil spring up and forward.
This is basically the same thing that was done to make the folding-stock paratrooper FAL work,
move the spring up and forward.
So hopefully this gives you an understanding of why you can't simply drop
an LC collapsing stock onto a standard CETME L rifle.
And frankly, even if you have the proper internal bolt carrier,
if you want to put this stock on a standard length rifle,
you will also have to change the charging handle extension inside the cocking tube of the rifle,
or else it will be too long and the bolt won't be able to go into battery,
because this long extension will hit the long cocking handle of the standard rifle.
A couple things I want to point out from a handling perspective.
The buttstock has a rubber end cap on it,
got a few little serrations on there so it sticks to your shoulder nicely.
And on top of the butt plate is the rear sling attachment.
We have a serrated button here which allows the stock to be extended.
So you push that in, there's a ... snap catch that has a little bit of tension,
so to extend it, you push that in, and then you can just grab the stock
and pull it out. It only has one position that it locks into, which is this.
Which is, by the way, the exact same length of pull as the standard rifle.
The sights are identical because the sight radius hasn't changed.
Nothing's actually changed on the receiver.
Except I should point out there is no longer a bayonet lug on the front sight tower.
The standard rifle has this little lug on the front of the front sight block,
and that's what the bayonet attaches to.
This is one of the guns where the bayonet handle is actually set up here above the barrel.
... There's a ring around the muzzle and then the back end of the bayonet handle snaps into that.
Well on the LC this isn't long enough to actually support a bayonet,
so they actually got rid of the bayonet lug on the front sight block, which is perhaps a little surprising.
It looks like they actually had an entirely separate forged part for this because
that little recess isn't there. Either that, or actually probably more likely, they just milled it off
and never cut the recess in it.
Anyway, the standard full-length rifles, as far as I've seen,
all used a standard open three-prong flash hider like that.
But the LC had a closed flash hider, presumably because it's better at hiding the flash,
and there's more flash to deal with on this short barrel, so we've got that on there.
And then the front sling swivel is here, and it can actually rotate, well, it can rotate to top or left.
So you would connect that up to the bar on the top of your buttstock.
Now a lot of people would assume that when you have a shortened rifle like this,
you also have a lightened rifle, and that would be part of the point of doing this is you want it lighter and handier.
Well, you don't really get that with the CETME LC, nothing up here changed.
They just shortened the barrel by a little over three inches,
so you lose a little bit of weight for not having that barrel out there.
However the metal collapsing buttstock actually weighs more than
the standard simple plastic buttstock of the standard full-length rifles.
And so as a net change you only lose about 3 ounces of weight between this and the standard rifle.
So these are heavier than most of the online documentation says.
When I went to actually weigh them, the full-size rifle came in at right about 8.75 pounds.
It's not that light, it's a nice svelte rifle, but it's not particularly lightweight.
This, the CETME LC, came in at right about 8.5 pounds.
So it's kind of a chunky, dense rifle, especially when you collapse the stock.
You get this nice handy package, but you don't actually have really any substantial weight savings on it.
Anyway, this particular one was built for me by MarColMar Firearms.
They are making standard rifles, LVs and LCs. They do also make these with 16 inch barrels,
but with the collapsing buttstock assembly, so folks who don't want to have
a registered short-barrelled rifle can do that with a full length barrel.
I think actually they do it with a short barrel that has a long dummy extension on it,
so that if you do want to convert it later you can remove the extension
and easily drop it to the appropriate 320mm, 12.5 inch barrel.
... One of the other neat side effects of having this registered as a short-barrelled rifle is that ...
we're going to get into a little bit of US legal minutiae here, but rifles manufactured in the United States
have to have a certain number of American-made components in them.
This is a part of the law called 922 section (r), and it's something that is well known to anyone who builds parts kits,
including companies like MarColMar that do this as a large-scale manufacturing thing.
However, this applies only to rifles, not to short- barrelled rifles, which are considered a different thing.
A short-barrelled rifle can be made of 100% foreign-made parts.
And so I actually picked up the parts kit for this right when they first came into the country
four or five years ago, and I held onto it for a while until I found MarColMar actually building them.
I sent my kit to MarColMar to have them build it because there weren't very many of these LC kits
that actually came into the country. And so MarColMar I think is doing a lottery
to try and allocate them in some fair way to its customers.
I didn't want to take my chances on a lottery, because I went ahead and I'd bought a parts kit very early on.
So, MarColMar built this for me off of my own parts kit, and it has the original handguard, the original pistol grip.
All the parts that MarColMar remanufactured to make them look really nice on their standard rifles,
well, I'd rather have the original parts. And a lot of the CETME LC kits were in really nice condition,
unlike the standard Ls, and so there was no legal issue because this is a registered short-barrelled rifle.
So I've got all the original bits in it, which I think is pretty cool.
And I think this is a pretty neat, handy little rifle to shoot.
So we will have a separate video coming up later on doing some shooting with this
and a standard CETME L side by side, give you guys some firing range impressions of them.
But, until we get to that, I thought it'd be cool to show you the actual mechanical changes.
So hopefully you enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.
[ sub by sk cn2 ]